Postcard Thursday: The Battle of Washington Heights

Should you find yourself in Washington Heights, stop by Fort Tryon Park (home to the Cloisters); today marks the 241st anniversary of the battle of Fort Washington, where 3,000 Hessian troops and 5,000 British regulars overwhelmed the American troops. 

In the fall of 1776, the Americans were on the run. They'd abandoned Lower Manhattan in September and despite a minor American victory in Harlem Heights on September 16, George Washington's troops were then routed at White Plains on October 28. In the wake of that loss, Washington ordered General Nathanael Greene to abandon Fort Washington in Upper Manhattan and head to New Jersey. However, Greene and the post's commanding officer, Colonel Robert Magaw, convinced Washington that the fort was defensible. That turned out to be a grave miscalculation, in part because one of Magaw's soldiers, William Demont, turned out to be a traitor, and had already given the British details of the fort's defenses.

By the end of the battle, 59 Americans had been killed and nearly 3,000 taken as prisoners of war. Many of these prisoners would subsequently die in the fetid conditions of British prison ships in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn.

One American killed was John Corbin. His wife Margaret, a nurse who been allowed to join the soldiers in the fort, took his place at his cannon and continued firing until she was gravely injured. She never fully recovered from the wounds she received that day and later became the first woman to receive a military pension.

Fort Washington itself stood where Bennett Park sits in Washington Heights. After the British victory, the fortifications were renamed after Sir William Tryon, the British governor; today, the main road in Fort Tryon Park honors Margaret Corbin.

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Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Malcolm X and the Audubon Ballroom

Saturday, February 21, 2009, marks an unfortunate anniversary—it has been 44 years since the murder of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. You may remember from back in the early 1990s that Columbia University made headlines with its plans to demolish the Audubon Ballroom to build a biomedical research lab. This angered the African-American community and while the lab got built, then-Borough President Ruth Messinger was able to broker a compromise in which parts of the façade (pictured) and the ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated would be preserved.

The original building was erected in 1912 and was designed by renowned theater architect Thomas W. Lamb. Planned as a multiuse building, with twenty-five stores and a mixed vaudeville/movie theater, the original budget of $1 million soon doubled to $2 million. The theater opened in November 1912 with a seating capacity of 3,400. An additional 2,800 people could be accommodated in the roof garden and an unspecified number in the ballroom.

In the 1930s, the theater was the target of at least two bombings, both of which were apparently part of a labor dispute between the Motion Picture Operators Association and the United Motion Picture Operators Union (which kind of sounds like Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea) and soon thereafter, the space was leased to Temple Emes Wozedek. By the 1950s, Washington Heights was one of the largest German –Jewish neighborhoods in the city and in 1951 the synagogue had over 1,000 families as members.

By the 1960s, the demographics of the neighborhood were changing again and the ballroom was mostly being hired out for events. On February 21, 1965, while addressing the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X was shot in a well-coordinated attack. His home had been fire-bombed just a week earlier and he knew his life was in danger, but chose to speak anyway. A statue to the slain Civil Rights leader now stands in the lobby of the Audubon. You can visit by taking the A, C, or 1 train to 168th Street and walking three blocks south on Broadway.

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More about the life and tragic death of Malcolm X can be found in our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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